Past Event: Oden Institute Seminar

Babuska Forum: Cracking the Zinc Finger Code: Work in Progress

William Press, ICES, Institute for Cellular and Molecular Biology

Abstract

Zinc finger proteins are known to bind selectively to DNA targets and, with more than 1000 known in human, are presumed to have a significant role in the regulation of gene expression. However, there has been little success in determining the correspondence between individual zinc finger proteins and regulated target genes. Thus, the vast majority of zinc finger proteins have completely unknown functionality. The problem is that we don't know, with any precision, the "code" that relates the sequence of variable amino acids in a zinc finger protein to the sequence of nucleotides that it binds to in DNA. This talk describes some partial progress towards cracking the code informatically and identifying the targets of individual zinc finger genes. No knowledge of biology is presumed in the talk.